A network environment typically includes hundreds and thousands of network nodes and/or devices, such as routers, gateways, hosts, hubs, and switches, capable of delivering information using packets or packet flows from source devices to destination devices. With increasing demand for more information to be transmitted between users/subscribers and content providers, network providers constantly upgrade the network(s) to up-to-date technology with faster high-speed communication links to handle voluminous data files. High-speed communication typically enhances bandwidth and speed for voice, video, and data transmission to/from subscribers and/or content providers.
With exploding growth of mobile video, audio, and data transfer over cellular or wireless network, service providers are transitioning from 2G (second-generation) wireless service to more data intensive 3G, 4G, or 5G services. Moving or transporting massive amounts of video and audio information over a communications network can cause traffic congestions partially due to the fact that the pace of growth in demand for network bandwidth is faster than the pace of improvement in technology that is able to handle the traffic. With increasing capability of video presentation in mobile devices, channelized media broadcasting over a mobile communications network is in demand. The growth of mobile data fosters mobile traffic congestions.
To provide media broadcasting, typical video broadcasts are predominantly uni-casting between end user's device and content provider or server. A problem associated with uni-casting video delivery method is that it is a point-to-point link for each end device and it consumes a lot of network resources if many point-to-point links are established. Multiple users or subscribers receive the same broadcast via multiple point-to-point links can clog the network.
To improve media broadcast capability, service provider employs multimedia multicast broadcast such as Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Services (MBMS) to deliver channelized video content via existing cellular network. However, a problem associated with the conventional multicasting services such as MBMS is that the service delivers media content without knowledge of usage of channels and number of users or viewers. For example, using MBMS to broadcast channelized video content to one (1) or zero (0) user is not an efficient way to use network resources.